Not sure what the "to your face" rule is? His advice is almost _all_ conclusions phrased as if to be applied universally. Example, from the PDF: "If you have

Not sure what the "to your face" rule is? His advice is almost _all_ conclusions phrased as if to be applied universally. Example, from the PDF: "If you have a lot of content (such as product information) to display, use a separate page rather than a modal view". That is not a friendly tip or even a very constrained piece of advice. It doesn't say "consider using" or "try", it says "use". If you think I'm being nitpicky you haven't been subjected to project owners sending you emails with quips like that, expecting you defend yourself against the laws set down by the experts. It may actually make sense in many cases, but there are certainly cases where it's not true. As for methodology, he offers very little insight and no new ideas. You can spend an hour reading Steve Krug's book and understand the mechanics of usability testing. The rest is common sense and experience. UX is not voodoo, it's an art. Usability is a holistic quality, not an aggregation like uptime or code coverage or conversion rates. It's pretty widely accepted that the Tivo is a hallmark of usability. Why? Can you answer that only in statistics? Can you then justify why you picked those particular statistics and why they determine "usability"? Are your results reproducible? I'm not saying you actually need to run through the full scientific method on usability, I'm just saying that running through only parts of it to sound fancy benefits nobody. You need to learn when things are just better, and you need to admit that it's ultimately an opinion, an idea, an artform.